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Monday, December 31, 2012

A wonderful Christmas with family meant not as much reading and reviewing but that's what the holiday is all about. :-) This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

My Bookstore edited by Ronald Rice
A Different Kind of Normal by Cathy Lamb
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash
I Want to Kill the Dog by Richard Cohen
The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen by Syrie James

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

His Mistress by Christmas by Victoria Alexander
The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye
Happily Ever Madder by Stephanie McAfee
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
I Married You For Love by Lily Tuck
The Book of Neil by Frank Turner Hollon
How to Tame a Willful Wife by Christy English
The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha
Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman
Yours Affectionately, Jane Austen by Sally Smith O'Rourke
Vanity Fare by Megan Caldwell
A Different Kind of Normal by Cathy Lamb
A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash
I Want to Kill the Dog by Richard Cohen
The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen by Syrie James

Going out of town always worries me. What if books get delivered while I'm gone? They might think I don't want them if I don't take them into the house immediately. (Yes, I anthropomorphize my books. So what?) But after a nice Christmas with family, I'm home and reveling in the book that arrived in my absence, letting it know just how wanted it really is. :-) This past week's mailbox arrival:

All the Lonely People by Jess Riley came from the author. (This arrived with the cutest felted mitten ornament too.)

A novel about a woman who realizes after her mother's death that she doesn't like her siblings causing her to advertise for a new family for Christmas, this sounds like it will be fantastic, especially for those of us who have just spent two holidays with family. ;-)

An international "you can't go home again" novel, I can't wait to read about this Italian-American family and everything that gets stirred up when they have to travel back to their native Italy and face the family they left so long ago.

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Suko's Notebook as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

My uncle kept chickens when I was small. We'd go to visit him and be given the task of collecting eggs from the coop. This sounded like a great and fun thing to do until we remembered the rooster. He probably had a name but I don't recall it. All I know is that he was pure evil, gleefully attacking defenseless children. At least until we got smart and started wielding the 2x4 kept just inside the chickens' enclosure. A few swipes (and maybe a hit or two) as he charged and he was wary about pecking, buying us enough time to collect the couple of eggs and get out. It was with this image in my head and a whole lot of skepticism that I opened up Brian McGrory's new narrative non-fiction, Buddy: How a Rooster Made Me a Family Man.

The title and the cover are slightly misleading though as the book really details a large chunk of McGrory's life rather than being purely a memoir of his life with Buddy the rooster. Journalist McGrory was divorced and single, living in downtown Boston with his beloved dog Harry. He was an urbanite to the core and happy in his more than comfortable life in the city. His lovely, devoted golden retriever Harry was a joy with him for only ten short years, succumbing to cancer and leaving McGrory bereft. Through Harry's final illness, McGrory grows closer to Harry's vet Pam, finding her a sympathetic person and kindred spirit in the care of his much loved dog. It is only some time after Harry's death that Pam's marriage dissolves and she and McGrory ultimately fall in love. And that brings about the biggest changes in McGrory's life thus far: a move from the city to full-on suburbia, stepdaughters, and a menagerie of animals not of his own choosing, including Buddy the rooster.

Buddy does not like McGrory, aggressively attacking him to protect his flock (Pam and her girls). And the feeling is mutual, with McGrory disliking Buddy in equal measure. But more than his conflict with this territorial chicken, this is a memoir about compromise, the re-making of a family, the nature of devotion, and change at mid-life. While McGrory doesn't come off as particularly appealing here, the others in the book come off worse. Pam's daughters seem to be entitled, spoiled brats who are never called to account for their obnoxious behaviour. Pam, as a vet, is strangely oblivious not only to Buddy's needs as a chicken but over the top indulgent of his bad behaviour. McGrory himself spends a lot of time bemoaning the loss of his formerly uneventful and pleasant single life in the city and he portrays himself, perhaps unintentionally, as a doormat, subsuming his own happiness in lieu of keeping his new life on an even keel. There seems to be little to no recognition of this new marriage as a partnership. At least in the case of Buddy, it is all about Pam's love for this rather nasty seeming rooster. And that's exasperating as a reader.

Nothing about adding a new person to a family is easy, especially when the person being added has spent years on his own, living life without anyone to whom to be accountable, and ordering his existence with only a thought to his own happiness. But McGrory seems to head 180 degrees the other way in trying to forge a new married life with stepchildren It is all about Pam and the girls' happiness completely at the cost of his own. The third of the book that is a love letter to his dog Harry is lovely and heartfelt. His subsequent struggle to become part of a larger family is less lovely. All of it is well-written but the unevenness of interest in the narrative handicaps the book as a whole. That said, there is heart here and although I personally would have had fried chicken long ago with Buddy featuring as the main dish, it is interesting what McGrory claims to have learned from the obstreporous chicken and how he has changed (willingly) as a man and a husband as a result. Readers who enjoy any sort of pet memoir will find humor and pathos in equal measure here but readers looking for one that is centered solely on the chicken on the cover need to know that Buddy isn't really the main focus here.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

The Aschers once lived what seemed a charmed existence. Celebrated playwright and actor Joe married successful actress Laura and they and their two children, Thomas and Emily, enjoyed summers at the family cottage in the Berkshires, their escape from New York City. But beneath the shiny exterior, there are widening fissures and cracks even before seventeen year old Thomas, suffering from lymphoma, dies, an event that exposes the extent of dysfunction and tears the family apart. Hyatt Bass has written an intense family drama in her first novel, The Embers.

Opening with daughter Emily Ascher trying to plan her wedding, wanting to hold it on the hillside where her brother's ashes are scattered, the narrative jumps between the present and the past. With Joe and Laura now divorced and each of them having a problematic relationship (or non-relationship) with Emily, the estranged Aschers must come to an uneasy detent, face the tragedy that ripped them apart, and learn to build a fragile future while ackowledging that devastating past. In the face of her wedding to a really nice, amazing guy, Emily still finds herself wondering what her brother would say about her fiance, about the state of their family, about her life and the way in which she has changed, turned herself around. Interwoven with her growing apathy about the wedding, is the history of that fateful year and what really happened the night that Thomas died, why it has wounded each of the Aschers so deeply.

This is a psychological study of a family stepped in bitterness, sorrow, and regret but also of a family wanting to finally reconcile with the past and to be able to move unburdened into the future. It jumps between the past of the 1990s and through to the present of 2007 in each of the voices of the main characters (although Joe's voice dominates) giving the reader insight into each of the characters' ideas about what really happened the night that Thomas died as well as their own personal stories and the state of the family leading up to the tragedy. The various narrations highlight the small and large ways in which each of the characters feels the family as a whole and as individuals has failed him or her. And none of the characters are all that sympathetic, each of them self-absorbed and unable to recognize pain in the others, so focused on their own perceptions that they are blind to the fraying of their relationships.

And yet, despite the lack of emotion, the slowness of the building atmosphere, and the frustration the reader feels towards the obviously damaged characters, the story still weaves a spell that holds the reader's attention. The mystery of what actually happened to Thomas the night he died and how and why the guilt from then has so long been apportioned as it has turns out to be of little importance in the grand scheme of it all although the carefully controlled revelations of more and more information as the story progresses suggests otherwise. It is the chance of reconciliation and healing through Emily's upcoming wedding that ultimately drives the novel. It's powerful, beautifully written, realistic, and elegaic but with a kernel, just the smallest glimmer, of light and hope despite the initial catastrophic unraveling of the family and that makes all the difference.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Celebrated war photographer Robert Capa put himself in harm's way to capture the gritty, terrible, hell of war alongside the soldiers. In the opening of this novelization focused on his pivotal affair with Ingrid Bergman, he parachutes into the French countryside with paratroopers, snapping pictures, dispassionately registering men dying around him. He snaps blurry but important pictures of the storming of the beaches of Normandy as he follows so many young men into the churning bloodbath of that pivotal battle. He is on hand for the end of World War II in Europe, living in Paris, battle-worn and tired, as the war winds down and the world tries to right itself. Ingrid Bergman, the Academy Award winning actress whose life is stultifying, safe, and completely prescribed, has just arrived in Paris to entertain the troops still waiting to be returned home to the States when she meets Capa at the Ritz Hotel.

As these two very different people, both at a crossroads in their lives and searching for direction, come together in a passionate and brief all-consuming affair, they cannot escape their pasts or avoid their futures, only able to snatch a tiny piece of time out of time with each other. Greenhalgh has vividly drawn a tortured Capa, hard-drinking, casual with money, and unable to envision life in a civilian world. Capa narrates his own sections in first person, his inner turmoil and unsettled feeling coming through in a staccato and sometimes choppy voice. Bergman's sections are narrated in the third person, making her character more remote and more of a cipher than Capa's character. Constrained by her public image, the world's and her studio's expectations of her, and the very fact of her marriage to husband Petter plus the existence of her small daughter, Bergman has to subsume her desire for Capa and their love affair, keep it clandestine and private in order to ensure her seemingly assured Hollywood future.

The story of their affair is told using very photographic imagery which occasionally tips over the top into something a little too saccharine, especially given the fact that their love story was in fact doomed to be destroyed by the glare of Hollywood, Capa's demons, and Bergman's obligations. Both the post-WWII Parisian setting and the lushly successful Los Angeles scenes were sharply observed and cinematically described and Greenhalgh has woven both Capa's and Bergman's pasts skillfully into the narrative, adroitly placing their love in the larger context of their lives. Their love may not have been destined to last forever but it was certainly pivotal for both of them, shaping each differently and driving them to their ultimate decisions. Obviously, as both Capa and Bergman were real people, Greenhalgh has had to make them as believable as possible given what we know about them but he has added many thoughts and feelings that no one could have known, integrating his own inventions into the real life people and doing it well enough that we don't question the truth of their inner selves. An intriguing read, fans of Golden Age Hollywood will certainly appreciate this glimpse of a moment in the life of one of the iconic actresses of the era, and all readers will most likely be inspired to visit (or revisit) Bergman's films and to search out Capa's amazing photographs in the wake of this novel.

Friday, December 28, 2012

I used to work at an independently owned bookstore. This was many years ago before I had kids. And as frustrating as that place could be (it cured me of wanting to own my own bookstore), there really was something magical about it. After I chose to stay home with my babies, we moved away from the town it was in but whenever we came back to visit, that store was one of the first places I popped into each and every trip. It was a startling and sad day when I heard through old friends that it was closing even though we had been gone from the city where it was for years by then. And in all honesty, when we drive through now once or twice a year, it's still a reflex for me to glance over to where it used to be, briefly forgetting and fully expecting it to still be shining out from its welcoming space. Independent bookstores do inspire that kind of long time loyalty and I'm still jealous of the people who have their very favorite store still around for them. In My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop, this collection of brief essays extols the included writers' neighborhood independents, the stores that have meant the most to them as an author, or even just the stores that invariably welcome them and gives them joy whether close to home or a continent away. And the essays capture the ways in which these special stores feed the soul, encourage growth, and foster the imagination for all of us.

The stores are located all over the country and the writers are from a variety of genres but each of them share their deep connection to the owners, employees, and spaces that make their chosen store so very special. Some of the authors look at the stores purely from the standpoint of a reader. Others tell of the welcome they've received as published authors. And all of them know that their chosen store is in fact the very best store not only in their corner of the city, state, or country, but in fact the best store anywhere. The writers' love for the stores is palpable in absolutely every one of the entries in the book. Some of the essays are short and others lengthier. Some focus only on the store in question while others are more rambling and farther ranging. Some are as much about the author him or herself as much as they are about the book shop. It's best to dip into the essays one at a sitting as they can run together. While each store is no doubt individual and they are peopled by unique and different folks, there are quite a lot of commonalities between good bookstores and so sometimes differentiating amongst the many highlighted here is difficult. This book is a neat concept and will certainly help me search out good independents, something I try to do when I travel some place new, but this is very definitely not a book to sit down with and read straight through because of the inevitable similarities between essays. Over all, it's a bit gimmicky but if it helps to maintain the fiscal health of the bookstores mentioned as well as those equally deserving but not included, it will have been a worthwhile gimmick and I'll be perfectly happy to have bought it (and at one of the included stores, just in case anyone was wondering).

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Jason Priestly (no, not that one) is not doing well. He's depressed. He gave up his job as a teacher to become a journalist but his work writing snarky reviews for a free local newspaper is not very fulfilling. He's still obsessing over his ex-girlfriend but according to her cheery Facebook posts, she just got engaged to someone else. His life is so dull his own most recent Facebook status update is that he's eating soup. Nothing much is going right for him and he's indulging in a huge pity party. Until one day when he helps a beautiful girl getting into a cab with a load of packages. She smiles at him and rides out of his life. But he has her disposable camera which he inadvertantly forgot to hand back to her and after looking for her at various different times on Charlotte Street and not finding her, his roommate Dev convinces him that he should develop the pictures despite Jason's own concerns about the ethics of it all. After all, the pictures might contain clues to her identity and if she is the girl that fate has directed him to find, he should at least make the effort, right? So goes the premise of Danny Wallace's debut novel, Charlotte Street.

Jason is wallowing in his own inability to find happiness. He's directionless and living a pitiable, disappointing sort of life until this missed connection with "The Girl" rejuvenates him, gives him a quest and a reason to get out of bed every day. But even as Jason starts to work through the pictures on the camera, searching for the girl, he must also continue to wade through his current life and find the strength to face the truths about himself and his past that are holding him back. He's not just on a quest to find the girl, he needs to find himself.

Although narrated by Jason with an occasional sprinkling of ambiguous blog posts from The Girl, there's a growing ensemble cast here with characters joining the story and becoming integral to the search for the girl. Flatmate Dev is the catalyst for developing the pictures but his quiet tolerance of Jason's gloomy gussing ebbing drives him to push Jason onward in the search. His new friend, Abbey, who helps him discover a hot new band; his old friend, Zoe, who continues to give him work; his ex; and a volatile former student named Matt all help him in his search, recognizing a restaurant, a watch, a destination in London, and help him look into his own heart and grow as he gets closer to the elusive girl meant to be. But it's not smooth sailing solving the mystery of her identity. Jason, because he is Jason, bollockses things up quite a bit, drunk Facebooking his ex, alienating Dev, and just generally being an immature git among other things. But just as in real life, these are speed bumps in the path of striving for maturity and on the way to contentment and the way that Jason handles them shows the ways in which he is changing.

The novel's premise is incredibly intriguing and Wallace has done a nice job with it. Jason isn't always the most appealing character and there are times the reader wonders if he deserves to find "The Girl." He is a self-absorbed, pain in the ass whiner a lot of the time but there's something about the idea of fate and his slow growth away from that pitiful, oblivious self-centeredness that keeps the reader in there with him. There are a ridiculous amount of coincidences, especially in the search, that might stretch credulity but serve to show just how connected we all are in this age of rampant social media. There are moments of good humor and the pathos of what-ifs. It's interesting to read a romantic comedy from a guy's perspective and this Hollywood-ready novel delivers not only that but a riff on connection and the importance of it in all of our lives. The ending is a bit rushed but overall, it's a fun and engrossing read.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for sending me a copy of the book to review.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Moving is hard. It's hard as a child and as an adult. And as strange as it sounds, it can be hardest on the awkward, shy, and introverted. Because it takes them so much time to warm up to people and they spend so much time in their own self-contained world, when they venture out of that comfortable solitude, they are more alone than the extroverted person who has had to leave behind a whole pack of friends. I know this because I am that person. And I have moved six times as a child and seven times as an adult. Nothing about moving is easy. But I've never had to move to another country and face cultural and language barriers in addition to the rest of the stresses of moving. Stephanie LaCava was just twelve when her father moved her family to France from the US. As she recounts in her unique and fascinating memoir, An Extraordinary Theory of Objects, this move, coming as it did when she was already feeling like a misfit, absolutely decimated her. As chronicled in these pages, she collected objects that became a way of keeping her anchored to the world, her way of reaching for connection during a painful and hard time of her life.

The memoir itself is told in a series of essays capturing memories linked through the cabinet of curiousities that LaCava was accumulating as she struggled to fit into her ex-pat life in suburban Paris. Many of the objects are illustrated in the text and are accompanied by extensively footnoted histories, breaking the narrative flow, causing the reader to retreat from the reality and sadness of LaCava's awkward, lonely teenaged years just as she herself did, folding herself into the objects that she collected and imbued with talismanic importance. It's a risky format as it will alienate some readers but others will be fascinated by this fragile girl's coping mechanism and terribly interested in the tangential information about the objects. I was the latter reader, but as LaCava herself says about the memoir as a whole, "Consider the source."

The memoir was moving and very personal, despite the footnote interruptions. It is indeed a bit odd, definitely unusual, and not what most people expect of a memoir. But it showcases beautifully the very remoteness of serious depression, the ache of being an outsider, and the loneliness of teenagers. It is not, however, a memoir of place but rather a person and Francophiles looking for tales of living in Paris will likely come away disappointed by the lack of Parisian feel here. The timing of the essays is not even and so while there are many pieces of her adolescence laid open to the readers' gaze, there are points glossed over and skipped entirely as well plus an essay or two at the end bringing LaCava from her unhappy years in France to her adulthood and to the genesis for the book. The very breadth of the pieces highlights the fact that these are not one overarching narrative but very definitely connected vignettes. There is an emotional distance here, a retreat behind the objects themselves, but it is one I recognize and appreciate, a coping mechanism even now. And LaCava knows that she is looking back at the objects of her childhood, using them as the scrim through which to view a painful and haunting piece of her life. I thoroughly enjoyed this rather non-traditional, quirky, gorgeously designed, and unexpected little book but readers will have to appreciate it for what it is instead of what it's not.

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

Austensibly Ordinary by Alyssa Goodnight. The book is being released by Kensington on Jan. 29, 2013.

Amazon says this about the book: Steamy, funky, and thoroughly modern, Austin, Texas isn't much like the gardened country estates of Jane Austen's work. But there might be a few similarities in its inhabitants...

Cate Kendall is no stranger to daydreams of brooding men and fancy parties--after all, she teaches one of her beloved Jane Austen novels in her English classes every year. But as for romance or adventure in her own life, the highlight of most weeks is Scrabble with her cute coworker, Ethan, and he draws the line at witty banter. But Cate is ready for a change. When she finds a mysterious journal that seems to have a link to the soul of the great Jane Austen herself, she knows it's her chance. And she grabs on with both hands...

Before she knows it, Cate has invented an alter ego with an attitude, attended some seriously chic soirees, and gotten tangled up with a delicious mystery man. And she's uncovered enough unexpected secrets about Ethan that her Scrabble partner has taken to brooding looks and unfathomable silences. It's a positively Austenite predicament, and Cate is sure she'll land in hot water and heartbreak--but maybe not with Jane herself to guide her...

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

(As always, I reproduce our family's Christmas letter for all of you, my loyal readers. Enjoy and have a very Merry Christmas today.) I almost didn’t write the annual letter this year but then decided it wouldn’t feel fully festive at all of your houses without the much anticipated craziness from here. I’m just sure you all stage a reverent and dramatic reading of the letter and far be it from me to deprive you of such joyous entertainment. But seriously, if I don’t recap the year, the kids will never have anything concrete to point to in therapy and we certainly can’t have that. Without further ado, the 2012 K. year in review.

January: Starting the year off with a bang, the school called to inform us that T. had created an inappropriate password for some educational site they were using. The story is long and involved and too inappropriate even for my Christmas card so you know it’s bad. (Although feel free to ask us about the story because we do love to tell it.) But to prove that we are once again not in the running for parents of the year, both D. and I busted out laughing when we heard the password(s). I think this is the earliest that we’ve a) ever been called by the school and b) that we’ve kissed that parents of the year award away.

February: After 10 years of abuse, the minivan’s transmission finally pooped out and K. had to get a new van. The very next day D. also got a new car. He might have been operating under the influence of new car smell and so not entirely sober when he signed those papers. K. understood as the new car smell was pretty enticing, at least as long as it lasted (not long, incidentally) against the usual funk of dance shoes, sweaty socks, and various other stinky kid stuff. Also this month, W. made the high school’s tennis team.

March: T. hit double digits (10) which means we no longer have any little kids at our house, not that he’s ever thought of himself as a little kid. R.’s dance competition season started to hit full stride and even K. got to participate on stage this year, tossing bathrobes and shower caps above a folding screen. Pretty sure it was the tightly choreographed tossing by the moms that garnered awards no matter what the dancers believe.

April: W. flunked his vision test at school this month. He was sure it was equipment error and that he was seeing just fine. One visit to the eye doctor later, although he’s still in denial about his blindness, he is now sporting glasses, which probably helped his tennis game just a bit. In a moment of weakness, K. agreed to chaperone T.’s field trip to Linville Caverns. She didn’t make anyone cry and all children emerged unscathed from the cavern. Aside from the massive migraine she developed, clearly a raging success.

May: After 3 years of being a model middle-schooler, apparently R. thought that she should get in on the school calling parents act. At least hers was simply a dress code infraction. Guess what it looks like if the last time you put on that skirt in the fall you were several inches shorter? Never mind that mom didn’t even notice how short the skirt was as the kid flew out the door. Oops! Best yet was that K. hopped over to school to take R. some shorts while wearing a tennis skirt that was far, far, far shorter than what R. was wearing.

June: W. got his driver’s permit this month. He seems to be channeling a little old man when he drives as his preferred top speed is about 10 mph. Even so, K. has gotten really good at clutching the armrest and hitting the imaginary passenger-side brake. She also fears for her side view mirror and all the neighborhood mailboxes. D. just plain refuses to drive with him and that might be best for both of them! Also this month, K. had a benign cyst on her head removed leaving her with a hole in her head (which might be why she continues to encourage W. to practice his driving).

July: Once again we headed to Michigan as soon as R.’s dance Nationals finished. Amazingly we had 5 whole weeks up there this summer. And by “we,” I don’t mean D. But if you’ve been getting this letter for years, you already know that. He did get to join us for a week this year though. T. took a boating safety class and got his boat license. Too bad it’s not valid for another four years. He’s already called getting to drive the boat first once he’s officially legal at 14.

August: As of this month, we have two kids in high school! W. as a sophomore had a lot of words of advice and warning for freshman R. Luckily her momma didn’t raise no dummy and she didn’t believe a word he said. Also, once home from Michigan, the kid activities ramped up again rather quickly. Tennis for W., dance for R., soccer for T., and gassing up the minivan for K. (Yes, that last bit is lifted verbatim from last year’s letter but I see no reason to reinvent the wheel, especially since it’s still true.) D. and K. went on a scuba trip over Labor Day weekend. Unfortunately, K. perforated her eardrum again on the first dive and spent the rest of the trip completely high on pain killers and hideously jealous of D. getting to dive.

September: D. took a new job at EMC this month. His new fancy pants title is Director, Client Solutions for the Virginias and the Carolinas. The job requires more travel for him, often three days a week, but the dogs really appreciate the extra space in the bed those three nights.

October: Some people have dry ice smoking on their porches at Halloween; K. chose to shun illusion and had real smoke, lighting the oven on fire this month. Aside from blackening the oven light so it no longer lights anything with the oven door closed, nothing else untoward occurred as a result. Of course, you may want to think twice about eating at our house given such mad cooking skills.

November: D.’s tennis team made states this month. Oddly enough, no stories have made it home from this weekend away.

As 2012 comes to a close, we hope that all of you are surrounded by family, peace, love, and happiness now and throughout the coming year.

Monday, December 24, 2012

When you think back on your childhood, you probably remember the goofy stunts you pulled, the fun, the innocence, and the joy. If you were like me, you wanted to please your parents and your teachers, get good grades, and play with your friends. If you were anything like Kevin Killeen's main character, Patrick Cantwell, in his short novel Never Hug a Nun, you wanted these things but somehow, despite your best efforts, you frequently fell short.

Set in the 1960s in St. Louis, this novel has the feel of a memoir told in vignettes to it. When the story opens, Patrick is at the end of first grade at Mary Queen of Our Hearts Catholic School, the middle of three boys. He's the one who wants terribly to be good but he's so concerned with keeping up with his older brother John and showing his devotion to the beautiful, blonde Ebby Hamilton that he ignores his own conscience and gets himself into trouble more often than not. Peer pressure surely bites him in the butt every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Along with his brother John (but not younger brother Teddy, who has been a little more fragile since a bout with meningitis), and the neighborhood kid every parent wishes their child would steer clear of, Patrick gets up to all sorts of mischief, naughty antics and eventually even actual stealing that gets him arrested. They boys are smoking, jumping in front of freight trains, throwing tomatoes at buses, and dreaming up ways to get the money for a drum kit so they can start a band like the Beatles.

What starts out as a sweet novel about the innocence of childhood in a simpler time turns into snapshots from the life of a precocious, well-meaning deliquent of a child. Killeen has certainly captured the feel of parochial school, the changing Catholic church of the time, and the way in which the church was part of the very fabric of daily life for the devout very well. He's also done a lovely job with a childhood first crush, showing the embarrassment and the conflicting emotions that such a crush meant in elementary school. And his depiction of a father who goes downtown to work every day to support his family despite the monotonous boredom of his job and a mother who maintains the home because it is her expected sphere is spot on, especially for the mid '60s. The plot narrative here is very episodic and doesn't really have a discernible climax, rather it's simply one year in Patrick's life. As a character, Patrick seems to mean well but makes every poor decision in the book. And he also seems to be more of a deliquent than is normal or average for a 7 or 8 year old boy, even one growing up in a time when parents allowed their children to run free all day without today's stifling supervision. Killeen is clearly funny and there are moments that cause a chuckle in the book but there needs to be a bit more of a story to sustain the book. It's a quick, nostalgic read, especially for parochial school kids who have fond (or not so fond) memories of the nuns and priests and fellow Catholic school friends who peopled their childhoods.

For more information about Kevin Killeen and to read an excerpt of the book click here. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book. To buy the book, visit Blank Slate Press.

Thanks to Lisa from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace
Seducing Ingrid Bergman by Chris Greenhalgh
Buddy by Brian McGrory
His Mistress by Christmas by Victoria Alexander
The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye
Happily Ever Madder by Stephanie McAfee
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
I Married You For Love by Lily Tuck
The Book of Neil by Frank Turner Hollon
How to Tame a Willful Wife by Christy English
An Extraordinary Theory of Objects by Stephanie LaCava
The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha
Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman
Yours Affectionately, Jane Austen by Sally Smith O'Rourke

A mail order bride who ends up married to someone other than the man she expected, it turns out she's the one with secrets when she disappears leaving behind her husband and a new baby daughter. Shortlisted for the Giller Prize, this should be intriguing, no?!

Brit chick lit with a totally capable heroine whose life comes crumbling down around her ears before she starts helping people with internet dating and possibly finds her own prince charming. Sounds like a fun escapist read to me!

Ever since Byatt's Possession, I've enjoyed literary mysteries where modern day characters uncover previously unknown works and I've previously read and enjoyed James' work. Couple that with my complete Jane Austen fixation and this should be a huge winner.

A serious, researched look at the reason we Americans are so addicted to salt, sugar, and fat despite the horrifying health problems that result from our obsession. Hint: an enormous culprit is the processed food industry. This looks like a scary and eye-opening read and maybe the knowledge within it will help me out on my quest to eat healthier.

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Suko's Notebook as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Dog people are dog people even when they don't currently have a dog in their lives. They are the dogless people you see crouched down scratching furry bellies and looking up chatting with the dog's owner on the sidewalk. They are the ones who melt when they see canine cuteness. They are the ones talking to strange dogs in highly pitched baby voices asking a dog not even their own, "Who's a good girl? Who?" For a long time, Alison Pace was one of these people. And then she found the love of her life, Carlie, a fluffy West Highland white terrier. Her pet memoir You Tell Your Dog First is both a memoir of her own life amongst dogs and a paean to life with her beloved Carlie.

Told in short chapter essays, Pace shares her history with dogs, from her childhood filled with a parade of much loved canines of almost every stripe and breed to her adult, dogless life in New York City and finally to the life she builds once Carlie comes into it. The love that Pace has for all the dogs of her life is clearly palpable here as she recounts trusting dogs to know when someone is a friend or isn't good boyfriend material. When she realizes how much she wants a dog in her life, she sets out to remake her life so that she can realize her dream, searching for pet friendly apartments (no easy feat in the city), researching breeds and temperaments, and preparing to welcome a wriggly, tale-wagging, cold black-nosed, furry dog into her life.

Alison Pace has written a charming memoir and clearly she and Carlie make a happy pack. The tone of the book is chatty and friendly and most dog owners will find things in Pace's life that resonate. She is sometimes a bit over the top in her love for Carlie but she recognizes her excesses and writes of them with what one must imagine to be a wry grin at herself. Pace has certainly captured the joys of living with dogs and the many varied ways in which we dog owners bask in unconditional love that comes from our pooches. She also tells beautifully of the way Carlie connected her to the world, made it less impersonal for her, allowed her to drop her guard just a little bit and meet some of the wonderful people she might otherwise have walked on past. Because of Carlie, she knows the neighbors in her apartment building and meets folks in the park. And not only is she more connected to people, but she has a loving and perfect confidant who keeps all her secrets in her fluffy, white terrier. Dog lovers of all sorts will enjoy this light and pleasant read.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

In this day and age of instant information, the internet, Facebook, and Twitter, there seems to be no such thing as privacy or discretion. What we don't share about ourselves, others share for us and about us. The wealth of information about people that is instantly available for anyone with a little technical expertise is truly staggering. And we've developed a culture that feeds on this "news," feeling entitled to know everything we can, especially about the celebrities and public figures we love or loathe. Prurience seems to be at an all time high for certain. Worse yet, we don't care how this desire affects and even potentially destroys the lives of those we read or hear about. Jessica Grose's new novel Sad Desk Salad focuses on the gossipy, exposed world that our extreme need to uncover the private lives of others has created.

Alex Lyons is a writer/blogger for celebrity gossip website Chick Habit. She trolls the internet for information, writes a short bitchy article and sits back to watch the hits (the method by which her company measures her success) accumulate on her articles. This is not what she envisioned she'd be doing with her life but she's gotten quite good at it, finding juicy tidbits and exposing them to a large and faceless audience day after day. And then an anonymous tipster sends Alex a link to a video showing the college-aged daughter of a very conservative, smug "perfect mother," and rising politician doing cocaine. This is the sort of story that would cement Alex's always precarious job and take down a fairly nasty politician but it could have many other repercussions, especially for a college girl who never asked to be in the limelight but was thrust there by her mother's political ambitions.

While Alex wrestles with her conscience about posting the private video, obsessing about the situation and these people plus her own guilt, she is unable to see the ways in which her own life and relationship with her boyfriend Pete is completely breaking down. Her work is changing her as a person, and not for the better. When she finds a blog devoted to attacking the Chick Habit writers and discovers that it saves most of its vitriol for her, she is horrified and alarmed even as the fall-out and attacks as a result of her decision to run the coke snorting video also ramp up. Feeling attacked on all sides, Alex must face who she's become, what it has done to her important relationships, and how she can possibly make the changes that will bring her back to herself.

On the surface, this is a light and quick read but it certainly does contain important deeper themes and issues facing us in our instantaneous information, instant gratification, nothing off-limits age. What is the new morality and ethics; is it still the same old morality and ethics just in a new medium? Alex as a character is funny and snarky and delightfully neurotic. Her life is both fast paced and isolated and that definitely rings true. The secondary characters are fairly flat and one dimensional but since they exist mainly as screen names who interact with Alex in person only very rarely, this is perhaps fitting. It is interesting to see the other side of the glut of celebrity news, that of the people who find the information and make it available to the rest of us. If we feel slightly dirty for reading it, what must they feel as they ferret it out or expose it to a wider audience? Set over a very short time, Alex's revelations come to her rather quickly and the ending is resolved just a bit too easily but this is well-written and fun and anyone who enjoys, guiltily or not, celebrity gossip will enjoy this inside look at the way in which that particular beast gets fed.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

When I was in grad school, I chose to concentrate on a fairly little-known and growing area of literature: immigrant literature with a focus on Asian American writing by the first and second generations. There was actually a decent amount of beautifully written, amazing works that detailed the difficult position of being Asian American in a Caucasian majority society. The books tackled the sometimes self-perpetuating myth of the model minority as versus reality, the overt and hidden racism faced by those fresh off the boat as well as those Americans born and raised in the US, and the challenges of a hyphenated existence amongst a society that frequently still isn't fully accepting. The books also raised the issue of difference between the desires, goals, and asperations of first and second generations Asian Americans. So Eddie Huang's memoir Fresh Off the Boat, about growing up as the child of Taiwanese Chinese immigrants to the US should have been right up my alley. Unfortunately it was anything but.

Huang seems to think that he's the only one to ever rebel against the model minority stereotype or at least the only one to do so successfully on his own terms. The tone of the book is condescending with Huang coming off as always certain of his superiority. Frankly this attitude was wearying and unearned. His self-conscious over-reliance on gansgta slang and his 'hood credentials made the reading tiresome. And while he clearly wants to set himself up as a bad-ass, in the end, he comes off more as a dilettante poseur than anything else. He celebrates being kicked out of multiple private schools, fighting people at the drop of a hat, holding stupid grudges for years, and glorifies doing and selling drugs. All of his bad behaviour, explained as his protest against model minority status, is related with a wink and a nudge and a smugness that grates. This is a real shame as he has some very valid social insights and criticisms to present but they are obscured by his own unpleasantness and disdain for almost everyone he comes into contact with who might possibly treat him well and derail his overarching theme of his own triumph over those who would keep him down.

The memoir is definitely not a chef memoir in the traditional sense, focused almost exclusively on his growing up years from his family's downward mobility to their financial resurgence, his education all the way through law school, and only in the final pages, his family's opposition to him starting his own restaurant and eventual pride in his success. As he narrates his story, he spends an inordinate amount of ink denigrating and mocking white people as a whole, perhaps in retaliation for the very real racism he encountered (and perhaps still encounters). Even if it is deserved, it unfortunately doesn't make for interesting or gripping reading, at least not here. The pacing of his narrative is uneven and the book's writing is pedestrian, sliding in and out of his assumed hip hop dialect. Short shift is given to his adult years and because of the lack of detail about them, they come off as an annual Christmas card letter's collection of brag and gag highlights. As interested in this memoir as I was initially, it was, in the end, a terrible disappointment.

Thanks to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for providing me with a copy of this book for review.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

I should probably swear off of award winning books, at least lately. And I'm going to have to start skipping book club when they choose to read an award winner although in all fairness, this particular book was chosen long ago and I could never find the impetus to finish it until recently. Suffice it to say it's never a good sign when books take up extended residence on my bedside table. Although this National Book Award winner by Colum McCann is well written, this collection of inter-related stories tenuously connected by the spectacular 1974 Philippe Petit tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center left me unsatisfied.

The short stories focus on one day in the lives of very disparate characters. There's a Park Avenue matron hosting a meeting for her grief support group for mothers who lost sons in Vietnam, a celibate Irish monk living and working amongst the poor and drug addicted, the monk's brother, mother and daughter prostitutes, the judge who will preside over Philippe Petit's trial, and a counter-culture artist and his wife. The stories visit the characters on the day of the tightrope walk but also fills in each person's personal back history as well. Even so, some of the characters feel incomplete and one dimensional. Characters drive the slowly unfolding novel rather than the singular event that threads through each of the narratives. And as is often the case in purely character driven novels, the characters are incredibly introspective, perhaps too much so in the cases when their actions already telegraph their thoughts. In the end, the actual tightrope walk, although a true event, became inconsequential and simply a narrative technique to tie these people together in ways that end up being far closer than the reader first suspects. It took me a very long time to slog through the book because I just didn't really engage with any of the characters. McCann's writing may be techniquely well done but there was a cold, flat distance to it that held this reader at a remove. We might be on the ground looking up at the magic happening high above us in the air but we're too far away to actually feel any of the magic.

This meme is hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on.

The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler. The book is being released by St. Martin's Press on Jan. 29, 2013.

Amazon says this about the book: An unforgettable novel about a mysterious mail-order bride in the wake of WWII, whose sudden decision ripples through time to deeply impact the daughter she never knew

The Imposter Bride blends gorgeous storytelling and generation-spanning intrigue in the story of Lily Azerov. A young, enigmatic woman, Lily arrives in post-WWII Montreal on her own, expecting to be married to Sol Kramer. But, upon seeing her at the train station, Sol turns her down. Out of pity, his brother Nathan decides to marry her instead, and pity turns into a deep—and doomed—love. But it is immediately clear that Lily is not who she claims to be. Her attempt to live out her life as Lily Azerov shatters when she disappears, leaving a new husband and a baby daughter with only a diary, a large uncut diamond—and a need to find the truth.

Who is Lily and what happened to the young woman whose identity she stole? Why has she left and where did she go? It's up to the daughter Lily abandoned to find the answers to these questions, as she searches for the mother she may never find or truly know.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Sometimes you find a book that you know tackles an important, scary, or terrible issue but it's hard to make yourself face reading it because you know it's going to rip your heart out and make you face the evil of the world. James Levine's The Blue Notebook is one of those books. Tackling the horrific topic of child prostitution and abuse in India, this novel is difficult to read, graphic, and unfortunately more real than not.

Narrator Batuk is take from her small village to Mumbai and sold into prostitution by her father when she is just nine years old. She lives in a tiny "nest" on the street and she must solicit business from here, retreating behind a curtain to service her customers, or as she calls it "making sweet-cake," in order to ensure the continued happiness and wealth of her keepers, a large woman named Mamaki Briila and the more distant Master Gahil. Batuk details her story and experiences in a small blue notebook she keeps hidden and with a stub of a pencil inadvertantly dropped one day by Mamaki Briila. She tells of her early life at home as the apple of her father's eye and how unexpected it was for her, seemingly secure in her father's love, to be so callously sold into prostitution. She talks about her unspoiled beauty and the sale of her virginity to the highest bidder. She writes of her experiences in various underground places designed to make her compliant, sexually skilled, and appreciative of the tiny nest she calls her own when the novel opens. She captures her fellow sex workers, especially her best friend Puneet, a beautiful boy who is eventually castrated to preserve his youthful beauty. And she writes of learning to be exceptional at her job as a way to minimize how much she must do: the better she performs sexual acts, the sooner the men who visit her will be satisfied, pay, and leave.

There is a detached resignation to the writing here with Batuk telling her tale matter of factly and from a remove, even as she lives with the horror daily. And while the distance might be necessary so as not to overwhelm the reader, it also serves to minimize the emotional impact of the story, making the tale less visceral and less immediate. Batuk's life is in fact horrific and given that she was sold by her own father at such a young age, she has had less than no input into her own fate and prospects. She is completely owned by others and will be deemed disposable once she can no longer attract paying clients. Her voice here is not particularly true to her experience. The mix of maturity and naivete works but her eloquence and educated language are completely unbelievable no matter how smart she is given her upbringing and exposure thus far in her life. There are many graphic acts of violence and sex detailed and reading them is not for the faint of heart, especially as the depravity escalates. In the end, while this novel shines a light on the exploitation and abuse of innocents, it offers no hope for the future of those trapped in a hell not of their own making.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

The Blue Notebook by James Levine
Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCann
Sad Desk Salad by Jessica Grose
You Tell Your Dog First by Alison Pace
Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace
Seducing Ingrid Bergman by Chris Greenhalgh
Buddy by Brian McGrory
His Mistress by Christmas by Victoria Alexander
The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye
Happily Ever Madder by Stephanie McAfee
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
I Married You For Love by Lily Tuck
The Book of Neil by Frank Turner Hollon
How to Tame a Willful Wife by Christy English
Never Hug a Nun by Kevin Killeen
An Extraordinary Theory of Objects by Stephanie LaCava
The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha
Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman

Whenever the doorbell rang this week, I was certain that it would just be the last gifts I'd ordered for Christmas and yet sometimes I was wrong. Three times;it was a gift for me. ::squeal:: Books! Yay! This past week's mailbox arrivals:

A movie critic looking for inspiration from Dorothy Parker inadvertantly gets more than she bargained for when Parker's ghost inhabits her life. I've always loved Parker's wit and snark so I am really looking forward to this one.

A newly single mom finds a job freelance copywriting for a bakery and she could just find a happily ever after too. How could this not be fun and fantastic? Plus the punny title makes me smile.

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Suko's Notebook as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

It's been a busy week here. I had my usual week of driving to kid activities: four days of dance for R. at a studio 30 minutes from home, 4 separate soccer practices or games (winter training, indoor, futsal, and 3v3) for T., and the last tennis clinic of the session for W. I also had a tennis match and 2 lessons of my own to keep me busy while the kids were in school plus our holiday Bunko party complete with Dirty Santa gift exchange. But that sort of stuff is my usual weekly crazy. No, this past week the usual crazy has ramped up to spectacular crazy.

I managed to finally decorate the house for Christmas. Nevermind that I then discovered that the top two layers of branches on the prelit fake Christmas tree no longer work. I poked those suckers in anyway and am going to just go with our own version of a redneck Christmas this year. I thought about doing that Pinterest craft where you glue together small mirrors and hang them in the tree so that they multiply the lights but then I realized that they can't multiply lights that refuse to shine. So its a good thing I didn't waste my time on that craft (although I did pin it for next year because hey, Pinterest is like the Dollar Store of the internet: if you don't pin it now, when you go back to get it, you might never find it again and seriously I have always envisioned myself as someone with her shit together, another Martha Stewart if you will, despite ample evidence to the contrary). I'm almost entirely finished with my present shopping. Wrapping, now that's another story entirely but I may invoke my dad and husband's genius ideas of simply folding the top of the shopping bag over and taping it shut. Can you picture Christmas chez K. now? A partially dark Christmas tree sans ornaments (did I mention I haven't yet convinced the kids to decorate the tree) with piles of Target and Walmart bags artfully arranged beneath it. As an added bonus, amazon boxes require no taping shut to stay secret before Christmas day. Festive, no?

I also managed to successfully threaten my children so that they would cooperate long enough to take a Christmas picture for our cards. Thanks to the evil input of my friend C., I told them that if they didn't let me take a decent picture, I'd take pictures of them sleeping and put those snaps on a card to send out. The 15 year old thought that was fairly creepy sounding although the 10 year old was ready to buy into it as a choice. I did take the pictures as collateral and even had the perfect tagline for the card: And Visions of Sugar Plums Danced in Their Heads. Sadly no one was drooling the night I snuck in to take the pictures but that's what photoshop is for, right?! Since I finally had the actual picture, I also managed to order the cards. Unfortunately, the delivery date for them could very well be after we leave to spend time with my family. I guess folks will be getting post-Christmas cards from here this year. At the rate my last minute laziness is overtaking me, our 2013 cards (provided the Mayans are wrong) will actually turn into 2014 Valentine's Day cards.

Aside from Christmas related chaos, there were other add-ons to the routine. First I fielded a phone call from the assistant principal at the elementary school telling me that my youngest has been discussing a girl's boobs with one of his buddies. He also passed on a nasty rumor about said girl but the a.p. was quick to reassure me that they know he didn't actually start said rumor. Well, golly. That's a relief. :-P Given that the boys were told that their comments could be considered sexual harassment, I then got to explain what that was (and admit I was unclear as to why the a.p. was using the term so incorrectly but to suggest that plain old bullying, which is what this was in my book, was just as bad and that if I heard anything further on this or any other bully situation that T. would not be sitting down for a week and would be grounded indefinitely). This raising kids thing can really suck eggs. At least that was the only bad thing of the week, as long as you don't count the foul, smelly porta-potties at this weekend's soccer tournament (and heaven knows I'm trying to wipe them from my memory). More entertainingly, W. and R. had a club outing to an ice rink and we (D. and I) got to watch numerous crashes and tense wall clutching as so many of the kids hadn't ever had skates on their feet ever before. And all of this was accomplished while trying to maintain their high school dignity and to flirt. Truly giggle worthy. The things that pass as Friday night entertainment for old married folks. ;-) Date night with D. and then a Christmas party at one of his former colleague's house where I knew no one (an introvert's worst nightmare but a legitimate Christmas gift to my husband from me given that he knows my aversion to stuff like this--and the bonus is that it's a gift I didn't have to wrap and one I can use in my favor for the next several months as well) rounded out the go-go-go week for me.

Luckily I did manage to carve out some reading time to slow me down in between all of the hustle and bustle. I moved to France and accumulated small, meaningful objects that helped to ground me when depression set in. I lived the nightmare of losing a child and then 19 years later uncovering the truth about that day through the incredible act of forgiving his murderer. I created a support group of disparate women who had one thing in common: that they were all young widows and spent the next year opening myself up to life and love again. I am still in the midst of several other fictional (and non-fictional) journeys so this week will take me to new and different places as I contemplate everything I still have left to do: finish making the Buckeyes that are a staple of my mom and grandmother's stockings and which are meanly tempting the kids with sweet wafts of sugary peanut butter each time they open the fridge (peanut butter balls are rolled but not yet dipped in chocolate), write and print out the Christmas letter, and maybe, if I get inspired, actually decorate the Christmas tree and wrap the presents in something other than the plastic bags they came in. OK, that last bit might be pushing things a little too far.

Have you had a busy week too? What books have you been reading to take you out of your holiday madness?

Pop culture has never been a strong suit for me so perhaps it isn't surprising that I hadn't heard of British columnist Caitlin Moran aside from as the author of the successful How to Be a Woman. I haven't read her first, much-lauded collection but was still interested in reading this second collection of her previously published columns covering a wide variety of topics from pop culture to current events to politics. Tying each of the columns together, Moran has added brief introductory blurbs before each of them ranging from personal tidbits about herself and her relationship with her husband to reactions to the pieces to why she's chosen and arranged the pieces the way she has.

Moran is opinionated, funny, and snarky and her views are on full display in these pieces. There are interviews with famous musicians, her take on current television shows, her obsession with certain stars and her disinterest in others, columns on her own childhood growing up poor and on her own children, social ills, and so much more. While even I, under my pop culture free rock, recognize some of what she writes about, there are at least an equal number of topics with which I am unfamiliar and that certainly made the reading about Moran's take on those topics less interesting than I imagine it is when you are au fait with the topics. The writing itself is generally good even though the essays themselves are a tad patchy in terms of depth, humor, and interest. UK pop culture fans will probably delight in the entire collection and others can appreciate the occasional earned laughs.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Friday, December 14, 2012

If you love books, at some point in your life, you've probably entertained, seriously or not, the idea of owning a bookstore or working in a library. I mean, if you love books, truly love books, what could sound like a bigger road to bliss than working surrounded by them all day every day? But daydreams don't include the reality of actually doing it, being responsible for running a business and making a living amongst books. And if you do go ahead and do it, it's not as easy or idyllic as it would seem. Not that it's without its joys and benefits, certainly, but it is a business (and generally a small business at that) and comes with the attendant worries of all businesses plus some specifically tailored to the book business. Even so, Wendy Welch and her husband Jack Beck decided to follow their hearts and open up a small new and used bookstore in Big Stone Gap, Virginia without knowing exactly what they were in for. In this memoir of their adventure, Welch has chronicled the ups and downs, lessons learned, friendships made, and the ways in which they not only succeeded but found happiness living and working among books every day.

Welch worked in a soul sucking job in Washington, D.C. when she and Beck realized that she wanted nothing more than to get out of the snake pit in which she was spending her days. When the job became untenable, they upped stakes and moved to the carefully chosen Big Stone Gap with the idea of starting a bookstore there. They were complete bookstore newbies without any experience behind them that could have prepared them for all they experienced as they prepared to open the Tales of the Lonesome Pine Book Store on the first floor of their charming old Victorian home. They made mistakes, ill-conceived as well as serendipitous. They struggled and succeeded and learned a lot along the way. There was a steep, financially taxing learning curve to owning their own bookstore and even now, they don't make much but they are comfortable and content and that is more than enough.

From the genesis of the bookstore idea through to its actual functioning existence, this memoir takes readers each step of the way. The chapters, roughly chronological, each revolve around different aspects of owning and running an independent bookstore. Welch details their attempts at marketing the store on a shoestring and the ways in which their chosen location of a small town gave them both gifts and stumbling blocks as they strove for acceptance in a community that was not always too open to outsiders. There are sweet anecdotes and the brief introduction of bookstore regulars and other characters who wander into the store and contribute to the ongoing story of Tales of the Lonesome Pine Book Store. Welch talks about taking a trip to visit other independent bookstores to see how they ran their businesses and the ways in which that vacation changed and enriched their small store. Written very conversationally, as if Welch is talking to a customer or friend (or both), the book definitely has charm. It is, however, also a bit thin for its length and somewhat repetitious as well. Having worked at an independent bookstore, I was already familiar with much of what Welch recounted and many of her stories were stories I've already lived. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt but I found several patches of the tale dull and disappointing. Despite this, the book was a nice read but perhaps not of great interest outside of the small world of book fanatics.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously said that if you place a loaded gun on the mantle in the first act, the gun had better go off or there was no purpose in the gun being there in the first place. (I acknowledge that this is a gross paraphrasing but the truth behind the statement is intact.) Robert Goolrick has obviously internalized this maxim and uses it to impressive effect in his latest novel, Heading Out to Wonderful.

Charlie Beale is a stranger to the small, peaceful Virginia town of Brownsburg when he arrives with his truck, his set of butcher knives, and a suitcase full of cash. He starts by camping out by the river and deciding if this closed and somewhat xenophobic place is where he wants to put down roots now that he's back from fighting in WWII. And strangely enough, he does want to stay in this place that is initially less than welcoming, asking local butcher Will Haislett to hire him on, buying up land and eventually a house, and befriending Will and his wife Alma's five year old son Sam along the way to winning over the rest of the town.

Charlie, nicknamed Beebo by Sam, seems to have no past, at least no past he's willing to share, but he is a decent man and finds himself being folded into the life of the town, accepted and liked by everyone. And everything seems wonderful until he spies the beautiful, teenaged Sylvan Glass with whom he is instantly captivated. Unfortunately, Sylvan is married to the town's wealthiest and meanest man, Boaty Glass, who essentially bought his child bride, bringing her from her poor, hardscrabble existence in a mountain holler to be his trophy in a town not quite willing to accept her. Charlie, as another outsider, falls hard for Sylvan and although at times she seems almost diffident about him, they are fated and their inevitable ending was written the first time Charlie clapped eyes on her.

Goolrick has created a masterfully atmospheric novel here. Even before any conflict occurs and everything is seemingly perfect in this fictional world, there is an undercurrent of menace and foreboding, a dark intensity to the tale that makes the reader alert to the cracks in the facade of innocence and idyll. Narrated sixty years on from the main events of the tale by Sam, who was present for more of the story than anyone else in the book besides his beloved Beebo, this is a novel of desperate love, betrayal, mystery, and obsession. Charlie remains a cipher throughout the novel but even so he charms the reader as much as he charms the inhabitants of Brownsburg. Sylvan is distant and lonely and trapped by her past. Her method of coping, through fashion and the movies, is pitiable. The important secondary characters are intriguing, especially in the ways they face the main plot development. And what an unexpected development it is! Goolrick leads the reader, ratcheting up the tension slowly but steadily, as things between Charlie and Sylvan get more and more complicated, even as they are always bound and governed by outside forces, until the final shocking denouement, a plot twist that threatens to unravel much of the town. Richly detailed and completely engrossing, there is no doubt from the beginning that the book cannot contain a happily ever after. That gun casually placed on the mantle must go off. And Goolrick's aim here is nothing but true.

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About Me

A voracious reader, fledgling runner, and full time kiddie chauffeur.
If anyone out there wants to send me books for review (oh please don't fro me in that briar patch!), you can contact me at whitreidsmama (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you do write me there, put the blog name in the subject line or I'm liable to send the unread message to spam. My book review policy can be found here.